Canadian family loses three generations in Ethiopian plane crash

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Manant and Hiral Vaidya (at left in the picture) hold a photograph showing six members of their family who were among the 157 people who perished when Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 crashed on Sunday, at their home in the Toronto suburb of Brampton, Ontario, Canada, March 13, 2019. REUTERS/Chris Helgren

TORONTO (Reuters) - Three generations of a Canadian family were among the 157 people who perished when Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET 302 crashed on Sunday, a relative confirmed on Wednesday.

They were on their way to a Kenya vacation when the plane crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing passengers and crew from more than 30 countries.

Prerit Dixit, 43, and Kosha Vaidya, 37, their daughters and Ashka Dixit, 14, and Anushka Dixit, 13, and Vaidya’s parents Pannagesh Vaidya, 73, and Hansini Vaidya, 67, were among the 18 Canadians killed. They lived in Brampton, a Toronto suburb.

“This is terrible and tragic,” Manant Vaidya, brother of Kosha Vaidya, told Reuters. “It feels as if my whole support system has disappeared. I have no idea how we will cope up with this tragedy.”

The Dixit-Vaidya family was flying to Kenya so that Kosha Vaidya could show her Canadian-born daughters the country of her birth, Manant Vaidya said, adding his parents were returning there for the first time in more than 50 years.

Manant Vaidya works for the Reuters parent company Thomson Reuters. He plans to fly to Ethiopia on Saturday and from there to Mumbai for the final rituals of the deceased.

Dixit worked at medical-testing company LifeLabs as a lab technician and as a lab professional for Public Health Ontario. In email statements, both remembered his helpful and pleasant demeanor, his sense of humor and his dedication to family.

Kosha Vaidya had been a human resources adviser for the Canadian Hearing Society since 2017, the organization said in a website statement, adding she would be “remembered for her intelligence, professionalism and dynamic personality.”